Kermit Roosevelt, Leader of C.I.A. Coup in Iran, Dies at 84

By IRVIN MOLOTSKY

Published: June 11, 2000

WASHINGTON, June 10—
Kermit Roosevelt, who was a member of the famous American political family but who made his contributions to the nation in the shadowy world of spy craft, died Thursday at a retirement community in Cockeysville, Md., near Baltimore. He was 84.

Mr. Roosevelt's best-known exploit was as director of the 1953 coup that overthrew the leader of Iran, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a nationalist who concerned Washington because he was supported by the Iranian Communists at the height of the cold war.

Earlier this year, the Central Intelligence Agency's secret history of the coup surfaced, providing a detailed account of the overthrow, which brought Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi to power.

Mr. Roosevelt, the chief of the C.I.A.'s Near East and Africa division, spent much of his time in Tehran, trying to get the shah, depicted in the history as a vacillating coward, to summon the courage to dismiss Mr. Mossadegh.

''On Aug. 3rd,'' the secret history says, ''Roosevelt had a long and inconclusive session with the shah,'' who ''stated that he was not an adventurer, and hence, could not take the chances of one.''

The history continued: ''Roosevelt pointed out that there was no other way by which the government could be changed and the test was now between Mr. Mossadegh and his force and the shah and the army, which was still with him, but which would soon slip away.''

Mr. Roosevelt told the shah that ''failure to act could lead only to a Communist Iran or to a second Korea.''

On Aug. 16, fearing the coup had failed, the shah fled to Baghdad and the C.I.A. urged Mr. Roosevelt to leave Iran immediately. He refused, insisting that there was still ''a slight remaining chance of success.''

After the tide started to turn against Mr. Mossadegh, Mr. Roosevelt got one of the coup leaders, Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, out of hiding and he made a radio address to the nation that brought the forces over to the shah's side.

It was the C.I.A.'s first successful overthrow of a foreign government, and the shah stayed in power until the Islamic revolution of 1979.

''For an operation to last 25 years is not so bad,'' one of Mr. Roosevelt's C.I.A. colleagues, Samuel Halpern, said today. ''It fell apart. Every operation cannot go on forever.''

Mr. Roosevelt was a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was born in Buenos Aires, where his father, also named Kermit, was a banker and shipping line official, and he grew up in Oyster Bay, N.Y., near Theodore Roosevelt's Long Island home at Sagamore Hill.

In 1937, Mr. Roosevelt graduated a year ahead of his class at Harvard and married Mary Lowe Gaddis. Mrs. Roosevelt, who lived in the retirement community with her husband, survives him, as do their three sons, another Kermit, of Washington; Jonathan, of Sudbury, Mass., and Mark, of Brookline, Mass.; a daughter, Anne Mason of Chevy Chase, Md.; a brother, Joseph Willard Roosevelt of Orient, N.Y.; and seven grandchildren.

The younger Kermit Roosevelt noted today that the tradition of naming boys Kermit, without a differing middle name or a Jr. or a Roman numeral, could be confusing. He added that alternate Kermits were also known as Kim, and that was the case of his spy father.

That Kim Roosevelt dealt with the notorious Kim Philby when Mr. Philby served in Washington as Britain's liaison to American intelligence during the cold war. Mr. Philby later turned up in Moscow, escaping just as British counterintelligence was closing in on him as a Soviet spy.

The younger Mr. Roosevelt said today, ''Philby once said of my father, 'He was the last person you'd expect to be up to his neck in dirty tricks.' ''

Mrs. Roosevelt added that her husband never told her what he had done during World War II, when he was in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the C.I.A.

''That was spook talk,'' she said. ''He didn't talk spooks to me.''

His son said today that he thought his father was involved in planning the invasion of Italy.

After graduating from Harvard, Mrs. Roosevelt said, her husband ''tried to teach history to the techy boys at Cal Tech,'' and then entered the military during World War II.

After the war, Mr. Roosevelt stayed on in the intelligence agency and wrote and edited the history of the Office of Strategic Services. After leaving government, he represented American companies in the Middle East and worked in Washington as a lobbyist for foreign governments, including the shah's.

He wrote ''Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran,'' published in 1979.

Frederic P. Hitz, the Weinberg Goldman Sachs Professor of International Relations at Princeton University, said the book ''showed how covert actions were authorized in those days, without oversight. It was just a group of people sitting around in an office at the White House -- not the Oval Office.''

Because of the success of the Iranian coup, Professor Hitz said, Mr. Roosevelt ''was offered the opportunity to overthrow the government of Guatemala, and he turned it down.''

John Waller, one of Mr. Roosevelt's intelligence colleagues, said today that Winston Churchill had asked Mr. Roosevelt to discuss the overthrow of Mr. Mossadegh and, with Mr. Waller paraphrasing, said, ''Kim, if I were a young man again, I would have done anything to have worked with you in that operation.''

Mr. Waller said that Mr. Roosevelt had been brought up in what the British called ''the great game,'' the secret rivalry between Britain and Russia in the late 19th century.

''Kim was in that Churchillian mode of a 19th-century warrior,'' Mr. Waller said. ''He was a man of the times and a good man to have around during the cold war.''